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For the past five years, the participants to the Annual Meetings of the World Economic Forum (WEF) have gathered in Davos to discuss urgent global crises the world was facing: subprime lending, the credit crunch, banking, Greece, the euro zone’s woes, and so on. Soul-searching about the political and economic status quo ensued. This year, with leadership transitions in the two largest economies completed, the euro zone no longer facing imminent break-up, and China growing at 7.8%, Davos resumed some normalcy. Some even claimed optimism.

Some of the optimism is based on the growth prospects in Asia and China. For the past five years, while Europe has not grown at all, Chinese GDP has grown 60%. In this year’s Davos, there were no fewer than five public sessions on China, with topics ranging from its rapid growth, transformation of its growth model, and emergence of its soft power. Interests in Asia are high.

I recall the first time I visited Nakheel Palestine for Agricultural Investments Company fields at Jericho two years ago, when MIGA was still at the early stages of underwriting the project constituting planting date trees. The land was empty and, at the first glance, the first thought that came to mind was “how can this be developed into arable land?” When MIGA’s Executive Vice President Izumi Kobayashi visited the site for the first time a couple of weeks ago, we found ourselves in fields filled with baby date trees that have beautified the land with their green leaves. And in a tour in the packing facility of the project, we saw how young female workers were sorting and packing the dates, realizing that each of these workers is supporting a household of minimum five members in a very impoverished area.

Last week, the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) released its semi-annual report on FDI flows, which reflected generally dismal results: global FDI declined by 8 percent, with a 5 percent decrease for the developing world in particular. I found it interesting that South Africa’s significant decline in FDI seemed to catch a good deal of media interest. Yes, the continent’s darling and the usually one of the highest recipients of FDI saw a drastic drop (by 43%); admittedly this deserves more than a glance. But I wonder why Finland and Ireland’s numbers, at 96.2 and 42.8 percent respectively, didn’t make much news. South Asia’s inflows also fell by 40 percent as a result of declines across nearly all countries in the subcontinent. In India, inward FDI fell from US$18 billion to US$10 billion. Why South Africa? In my opinion, the flow of investment to sub-Saharan Africa is often reported as a sign that the doors of the last frontiers are being approached.

Last month, MIGA signed its very first contract of guarantee for a project in Libya. The guarantee covers an investment by Jafara Company to expand a beverage and harissa plant outside of Tripoli. (Harissa, if you have never had it, is sometimes known as the "ketchup of North Africa" — a hot chili sauce used to spice up North African foods.) The €7 million contract, underwritten through MIGA's Small Investment Program, provides cover against losses due to expropriation, war and civil disturbance, and transfer restriction. The project came to MIGA through a private equity fund out of Tunisia, AfricInvest, which is indirectly investing in Jafara through a partial acquisition from its previous owner, the MIMS Group of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

This past Monday I was present as the 250 megawatt Bujagali hydropower plant on Uganda’s River Nile – supported by MIGA, as well as our sister institutions the World Bank and IFC – was commissioned into active service.

After many years of preparation and planning, this was an auspicious moment indeed for Uganda, with the plant’s opening coinciding with the Jubilee celebrations marking the country’s 50 years of national independence. The new Bujagali power plant comes close to doubling the country’s electricity capacity and in a single step has elevated Uganda to having the second largest kilowatt consumption per capita in East Africa, following Kenya.

I’ve considered whether MIGA guarantees are, in effect, governance products. Readers might rightly ask how I’ve come to this conclusion. Consider what a governance product is: something that supports good governance (and by this we mean, first and foremost, eliminating corruption and its incentives). Thus, could not a MIGA guarantee be recognized as a governance product from two perspectives—that of the company that is our guarantee holder and that of the country host to a MIGA-insured investment?

In the new film “Arbitrage” the character played by Richard Gere thought he had made a highly profitable mining investment in an Eastern European country with a “friendly” government. But suddenly things are not working the way they were supposed to. He cannot access the returns from his investment —the government will not let him take them out of the country.

It was all about connectivity in the just-concluded World Economic Forum for East Asia that took place in Bangkok last week. Participants pondered many questions related to how we could make this region more connected, in terms of trade, tourism, investments, and even value.

In a session on infrastructure financing, IFC Vice President Karin Finkelston spoke eloquently about the need to mobilize financing for many developing countries in Asia and what IFC has been doing in terms of both investing and advising governments to prepare bankable projects. When Professor Joe Stiglitz on the same panel raised his proposal to establish an ASEAN development bank, it received mixed feedback from the fellow panelists.

This week, the World Bank Group’s Investment Climate Department hosted a stimulating discussion on the effectiveness of Investment Promotion Agencies (IPAs). The panel discussion coincided with the launch of the Investment Climate Department’s report on IPAs across the globe. MIGA co-sponsored the report and pioneered its methodology.

First, the bad news. This report makes for quite depressing reading for this startling finding: overall, the responsiveness of investment promotion intermediaries to investor inquiries is low, with 80% of IPAs not responding to sector-specific investor inquiries. This means that 80% of these organizations did not return a phone call or email from a foreign direct investment (FDI) “mystery shopper.” This translates to missed investment opportunities that are particularly needed now as the competition for FDI is so fierce.

Having spent some of my formative years on the African continent, I can attest to the fact that the frequency of power blackouts desensitized citizenry to the point that power outages were neither a cause of despair nor excitement but just another mundane facet of everyday life. Power outages remain common phenomena throughout most of sub-Saharan Africa owing to various reasons such as low capacity output, over-reliance on volatile sources of energy, outdated machinery, mismatched pricing, energy theft, low collection rates, among other reasons. Over 30 countries in the continent have suffered power shortages in recent years, with detrimental economic effects including lost revenues, typically ranging between 1 and 4 percent of GDP.